Mac Singularity

The iPhone App Store is up - with Astronomy programs

Marcos — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:04:43 +0000

So, I do have an iPhone, and I can’t wait for the App store. If you have iTunes 7.7, then you can browse the store. I found this neat looking program, called Starmap. Looks pretty handy - you can read more about it at its web site

Hmm, this is disappointing. The author of star-map says, in regards to controlling telescopes,

Do you plan to control telescopes with Starmap? This is technically possible to control telescope mounts with Starmap. I have made some successful tests through wifi (Skywatcher EQ6). However, following the agreement with Apple, no public application controlling mechanical devices will be released.

This is a tad surprising, since according to the NY Times this morning:

Instead, [the iFund venture capital fund] is backing, among others, iControl Networks, which is creating an application to let homeowners turn off their lights and alarms at home, as well as monitor security cameras, via their iPhones.

Indeed, iControl is listed in the App store. Perhaps turning off a light is different than moving around telescopes? I can’t say I quite get it.

Update There is at least one other similar program - iAstronomica. This one is $20, rather than $12 for Starmap. Be advised that apparently once you click “buy” that’s it - no warning, no shopping cart - so click carefully.

Update 2 The popular Clear Sky Clock also has an iPhone App version. It occurs to me that, astronomy being something that occurs in remote parts of the country, it may be hard to get online out there. the aforementioned programs carry their data with them, but the Clear Sky Clock will clearly need either EDGE/3G/WiFi to be of use.

Update 3 Indeed, as my commenter notes, there are other apps in this category as well. Uranus (iTunes Link), and GoSkyWatch Planetarium (iTunes Link). I think the app store needs some sort of demo/shareware option, where the program will work for a week or so at least. Hopefully someone will review all of these.

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Wifi Trick at the St. Louis Airport

Marcos — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:25:10 +0000

So, I’m returning to DC from the AAS today (a bit earlier than some). I found something interesting - the Boingo-run wifi hotspots at the St. Louis airport offer 15 free minutes to iPhone users, if you watch an ad. What I discovered is 2 things:

They determine you’re on an iPhone via user-agent strings
You can reset the 15 minutes by deleting boingo cookies

So, it’s fairly easy to get WiFi indefinitely on a Mac or your iPhone. On the iPhone just clear cookies (though that’s a pain because you can’t easily select which cookies to delete, so you may lose automatic logins to other sites too)

On a Mac you use the Safari “Develop” menu to pretend you’re Mobile Safari, watch the ad, then you’re in business. Once the 15 minutes are up, open up Safari’s Security preferences, show cookies, and select only boingo ones (easy to do with the live search text field), and then load a page at you’re back at the initial trial offer.

Who knows how long this will work or if they won’t shut the whole thing down when they read this post but it’s a neat trick and if AAS members read or subscribe to RSS from this site, you can try it out at the airport.

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Papers updated

Marcos — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:41:11 +0000

The PDF tracking software Papers is now up to version 1.8. It includes support for NASA ADS and other search engines and I have mentioned it in the past now and then.

This update to 1.8 may have happened some time ago, but the program continues to be improved and I think becomes more useful with each update.

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OS X’s Birthday

Marcos — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:32:05 +0000

Macworld | Editors’ Notes | OS X turns VII - Yes I bought OS X 10.0, and no I couldn’t do much of anything with it - it was too slow. When 10.1 came out a few weeks later though, you could definitely sense the way the Mac was going and clearly it’s been a great ride for Apple and OS X fans over the years. Now we see OS X working it’s way onto iPhones and iPods - no one would have guessed that 7 years ago.

Anyway, so Happy Birthday MacOS X, from all of us here at Mac Singularity.

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IRAF January 2008 Critical Update now on Download page

Marcos — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:41:29 +0000

So, I dropped the ball - the January 14 2008 critical update to IRAF? I never bothered to incorporated the updated binaries to my .pkg installer. I have done so now, and the installer for IRAF 2.14 on the download page contains the updated binaries.

This is also the first time I’ve used Packagemaker in xcode 3.0, so … I now am requiring authorization to install and I think I have it set up so that the iraf user will be given ownership, but I’m not 100% sure that’s going to work. Let me know if there are any problems.

Oh, and as an aside - did you see the iPhone version of IRAF?. Quite amusing.

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Papers 1.6 released - with arXiv and ADS support

Marcos — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:21:01 +0000

Papers now looks to be the killer app for finding and organizing PDFs of journal papers in astronomy. I’ll need to check out the bibtex export ability and such of it, but it was already quite handy and with ADS and arXiv now bulit-in; it’s even better.

Via a comment from the authors on the old Paper post.

As an aside, Macbooks and Macbook Pros dominated the AAS convention in Austin, perhaps even more so than usual. One of these years I should just do an entrance poll into the exhibit hall at AAS and ask people what platform they use. What do you all think, 60-70% Macs now? Surely something like that among laptop usage, but I would imagine there is still plenty of Linux on desktop machines.

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Leopard X11 Page at MacOSForge

Marcos — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:35:42 +0000

So, those of you who are running Leopard’s X11 may be interested to check out the download page at MacOS Forge which contains all the new changes made to Xquartz/X11, etc. since the release that made it into Leopard. They even have nice .pkg installers for people who want to install the latest versions before they become available in OS X Software Update.

Grab the 2.1.0.1 release and see the changes that have been made over the version in Leopard.

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IRAF 2.14 Available - Installers forthcoming here.

Marcos — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:35:24 +0000

IRAF 2.14 has been announced and is available for download. The Mac (PPC and Intel) versions appear to work properly on both Leopard and Tiger. I’ll try and have installers made for these today. Certainly, I can test the Intel one easily but it’s harder for me to test the PowerPC version so once it’s up if someone out there could test it, that’d be appreciated.

Update The Intel installer is available here - Download IRAF 2.14 for Intel Macs .pkg installer (57MB). My prescribed update method is simple. Change to the IRAF user and do:

  % cd /
  % mv iraf iraf_old

Run the installer and then:

  % mv /iraf_old/extern /iraf/extern/

That should preserve all your external packages. You will most likely want to copy over the extern.pkg from your old install.

  % cd /iraf_old/iraf/unix/hlib
  % cp extern.pkg /iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/extern.pkg

That should work. Let me know if there are any problems - it worked ok for me. I’d keep /iraf_old around for a while just to be safe. And remember any installer errors are probably permission issues but be sure to check the log first before emailing me with any problems.

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Airport Menu Trick in Leopard

Marcos — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 19:42:25 +0000

Via Daring Fireball, Tidbits has an interesting article on the new Airport Menu in Leopard. While I noticed the new “lock” icon that shows if a network is encrypted or not, the holding-down-option-key trick I did not know about. I like that it shows the transmission rate so you can tell if the connected station is 802.11g/b/n, etc.

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Check out the new Mac Astronomer’s Wiki

Marcos — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:38:46 +0000

Jessica Lu suggested that a wiki might be useful for Mac using astronomers to share their tips, etc. I have set one up here at Mac Singularity. Check out the Mac Astronomer Wiki here.

Anyway, register and you can edit and help out. We laid it out in terms of a setup guide for new astronomers (the one I wrote years ago is out of date) and pages for specific applications or tasks. We need more pages on, for example text editors, dare I say it - graphing programs, etc. So, register and contribute! I think for certain types of information, this could be a good way to get people with various expertise contributing.

Update Ok, I somehow managed to disable editing for registered users. No wonder nothing had changed over the last week or so. It’s fixed now.

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